But as Keda is forced to not just care for himself but also work with another creature, he grows bolder and more confident. He learns, eventually, how to spear a boar.Īt first, Smit-McPhee plays Keda as reserved and fearful. He walks past carcasses buzzing with carnivorous insects. You can imagine the PG-rated version of this movie, but Alpha aims for more realism than a PG rating would allow, and thus there are moments that induce uncomfortable yelps or grimaces or gasps. Alpha mixes a predictable plot with a wholly unpredictable setting The two, it soon becomes clear, will need one another’s help if they’re to survive the winter. In other words, we’re watching the domestication of the first dog, whom Keda names Alpha. Slowly, carefully, he nurses the wolf back to health and asserts his own dominance over the animal. The movie really only gets going once Keda is separated from the tribe and, while trying to stay alive, winds up in the company of a wounded wolf who has been separated from its pack. And what they’re actually saying gets a bit stilted at times. Alpha is the rare film that dares to imagine that American audiences are willing to sit in a multiplex and read subtitles, since the members of the clan, who already don’t utter much dialogue, speak in an unidentified prehistoric language. The greatest strength of this first section of Alpha lies mostly in its arty and even fantastical images - wide vistas, flickering firelight, slow-motion herds of charging animals - that make it seem better suited for IMAX screens and planetarium projection at science museums than just a movie theater.īut there’s a dreamy quality to the interactions between the characters in the film’s first third that sometimes slows the movie down. His broken-hearted father and the rest of the men leave him for dead.Īnd then, he wakes up. And when the clan tracks a buffalo, his timidity becomes his downfall, as he’s charged and then thrown off a cliff, onto a ledge far below. Keda is very soft-hearted, reluctant at first to kill any living being, which is not a particularly desirable quality in a hunter. But Tau assures her that Keda will be fine, and that he’s much stronger than she thinks. She pushes back against this plan, worried that he won’t return - she thinks he leads too much from his heart, and not his spear, to really be safe. Tau tells his wife Rho (Natassia Malthe) that Keda will accompany them. As the (relatively) warm season arrives, the men prepare to embark on the journey that will bring them to the hunting grounds. In that prehistoric world lives a clan of hunters led by Tau (Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson), a wise man who’s preparing his young son, Keda (Kodi Smit-McPhee), to eventually take over as his role.

I don’t know how historically accurate it is, but you sure feel the raw urgency of trying to scratch out a living as a hunter in the unforgiving climates of northern England without much protection from the elements.

Ice Age?Īlpha is set 20,000 years ago, and not in a cute or playful way. Kodi Smit-McPhee and the wolf-dog in Alpha Sony Pictures Releasing Alpha is a coming of age story set in the. If the boy-and-his-dog movie plot attracts you, you’ll like Alpha, but even if it doesn’t, the movie probably still deserves another look. But it’s genuinely affecting at times, too. That almost makes Alpha worth seeing just to witness how audacious it is. But its unexpected setting, images, set pieces, and even language balance out the sentimentality with a strangely raw and cinematically adventurous aesthetic that’s uncommon for a film of its sort.

Directed by Albert Hughes ( The Book of Eli), Alpha is definitely sentimental, even pandering at times. Vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-markīut on the other hand, Alpha is way, way off the map for such a film.

Metal saga alpha